


on pillars and point b

by Anonymous



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Era, Canon Rewrite, Canon Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:21:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28228314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Unlike most of the builders you know, and even a guilty indulgent part of yourself, he does not erect monuments to his own best qualities. No. His landmarks are squat and uniform and brought on by boredom. Tommy is an avatar of architecture, a talentless if passionate proponent of railways and paths and pillars and roads.Always trying to surge from point A to point B, that's your best friend. The modus operandi of a stubborn, wilful child. You wonder what it's done to him, to have to finally stand still.---Tubbo goes to find a friend. In their place, he uncovers the end of everything.
Relationships: Alexis | Quackity & Toby Smith | Tubbo, Clay | Dream & Toby Smith | Tubbo, Floris | Fundy & Toby Smith | Tubbo, Jschlatt & Toby Smith | Tubbo, No Romantic Relationship(s), Toby Smith | Tubbo & Phil Watson, Toby Smith | Tubbo & Technoblade, Toby Smith | Tubbo & TommyInnit, Toby Smith | Tubbo & Wilbur Soot, Toby Smith | Tubbo & Wilbur Soot & Technoblade & TommyInnit & Phil Watson
Comments: 15
Kudos: 146
Collections: Anonymous





	on pillars and point b

There's only one thing on your mind as you back away from your cabinet - your _army_ \- with a hand fisted against your mouth. The unholy pinkish froth of potions and pigs' blood is beginning to suffuse your uniform with a nauseating warmth. Now the adrenaline of the fight is finally subsiding, you can taste the thick coppery fervour of it under your tongue. No matter what the others think, it doesn't taste of victory. The thing on your mind is blood, and it is Blood.

There was a short and otherwise unremarkable moment, before your eldest brother killed you without hesitation, that you looked into the calm depths of his narrowed eyes and wondered if you would come back. If this was the one. If a youth of daisy chains and honeycomb and stories by the fire, of potatoes and Phil's laughter and sparring under the gentle glow of the moon, would be enough to endear your survival to the voices in his head.

You don't think it was. You woke up anyway. A casual death, like the dozens you used to experience most days thanks to clumsiness and brawls and carelessness and tumbles. Since you exi-Since Tommy left, you have encountered the blip of little deaths with a new and mollifying rarity. They say it's a sure sign of growing up.

Why didn't he kill you? It's common knowledge that you only have the one proper life left to lose. You stand against your adopted brother's entire wretched theology. Why aren't you dead, now?

You need to talk to Tommy.

It's something you promised yourself two weeks ago that you would never ever do. Call it a point of pride, call it strong personal conviction, call it whatever Quackity mutters behind your back whenever his predecessor is even mentioned. New L'Manberg, you reasoned then, needed from you an adult. It always has. Never before have you been up to the task. _Two lives gone by sixteen_ , people whisper on the wind, the grapevine coiling around your wrists with oily allure whenever you care to listen. _What a tragedy._

Two risks taken and two deals lost, for the slim chance of unity. Two childhoods traded away; for the solemn maturity that drapes itself over you like a king's mantle, and for the cocoon of violence Tommy has wrapped himself in against the dilemmas of the world. You were right to do what you did. He only withers in peacetime. You were right not to visit. He can only make things worse.

And yet. And yet, here you are, L'Manberg's leading man, walking away from a battle you began. Walking towards the right hand boy who knows nothing but war. You have found a grey humour in the irony of your horrors, as of late. Perhaps Fundy is rubbing off on you.

For all its faults, the aesthetics of New L'Manberg have been improved tenfold thanks to the restoration efforts. Where an old canal used to run alongside the podium, the crater that needs no introduction has started to swell into a glassy lake. There is a certain charm to the rebuilding. Though the terrain is totally unrecognisable, cabins on stilts where you had once kept hives under redwood trees, Ghostbur's touch is as obvious as Wilbur's once was.

Sometimes, at your weakest and vilest, you think you like Ghostbur more than you once adored his living counterpart. It's the kind of thought you don't notice until it's over. For sure you have more in common now than you ever did, even as kids, and you wish it wasn't quite so gratifying. Now you're both optimists. Both potioneers for the art of it, both marked by the hoof of Schlatt's ambition. Both friendly and enthusiastic and builders of safe houses.

Tommy, you reflect as you make your certain way through the empty streets and ready yourself, likes to build too. Not houses, mind, not looming statues. In this one thing alone, unlike most of the builders you know and even a guilty indulgent part of yourself, he does not erect monuments to his own best qualities.

No. His landmarks are squat and uniform and brought on by boredom. Tommy is an avatar of architecture, a talentless if passionate proponent of railways and paths and pillars and roads. Always trying to surge from point A to point B, that's your best friend. The modus operandi of a stubborn, wilful child. You wonder what it's done to him to have to finally stand still.

When you reach the ever-more-visible boundary of New L'Manberg and the SMP, you almost trip over something and stumble to your reddened knees. You don't care - you need to find Tommy and you need to do it now. But you glance downwards anyway, and feel the blood drain from your face.

It's a railway. Each plank is askew and rotting, the metal of each rail warped at the edges thanks to someone's shit sanding job, but it's functional. From experience you know how safe it isn't, and from more recent regrets you know how long it's been since anybody used it. So you keep on walking instead, padding down the railway, and ignore the way you leave grisly crimson footprints on the wood.

Wood becomes dirt becomes stone becomes dirt again becomes blackstone under your boots. It's only been a few minutes, but someone has probably noticed your absence already. The sun is setting. You're running out of time. What will they do if they find you here? It'll undermine your authority even more. Trying not to be paranoid, so Fundy's ears never flatten against his head in dismay. Doing your damnedest not to shout, so Quackity never flinches away from a teenager. The cabinet dynamic hangs in fragile balance, and running away to Tommy with your tail between your legs could bring it all crashing down.

Stop. Calm. Think. You pause on the cusp of the community portal, readying yourself for the fall. The sucking, cold feeling, like ice water sluicing down the jut of your spine and pooling heavily in your stomach, has always reminded you of the momentary twinge of little deaths. If ever you get angry enough, swept up enough in it all to challenge Techno again, maybe you'll have a third variable for comparison.

Oh, the troubles of the scientific mind. It was what drew you to Ghostbur, that pale and cheerful echo of the almost-brother who stole your almost-adolescence, and pushed you to ask.

Travelling along a road, he likened it to at first. That didn't sound so bad, you said gently. It didn't. At any rate, not until he described the abrupt end of that road - and the tang of gunpowder in the air forever, and the eerie distant clamour that was the absence of noise. Then Ghostbur forgot the entire exchange and tried to offer you a potion of healing with hands that dripped and swirled into the fabric of his sleeves, but you remembered. You remember.

A single step and the sucking purple light engulfs you. It rumbles and roars like something far more alive than it is. With your eyes screwed tightly shut and your nose plugged, you let yourself dissolve instantaneously into the space between dimensions. There is nothing and nothing and nothing.

For a worrying second, you imagine yourself suspended there forever in cool silent stasis and wonder if Ghostbur is wrong.

Most people hate the Nether. You are not most people. After the finger-numbing cold of the past few days, you can welcome the solid wall of warmth that hits you on entry with a fucking grin. There's constant danger to be found here, especially with less supplies than you'd usually take on a stroll down to the bloody Targay, but there's also a categorical placidity in the insane hugeness of it all. The roof of the cave curves away so far above you can't see it, the ocean of lava stretching gloriously into the distance like perpetual dawn. It is bigger than anything anyone has ever built. And you are happy, for a moment, because the burning reminds you of Tommy and he will know what to do. Or he'll say so, which is half the battle.

The cluster of piglins training a few blocks away do not bother you - you'd like to think it's the purpose in your stride, but you probably just stink of Techno after the failed execution. You turn from the portal's blackstone enclosure, where they grunt and chuckle, and sigh an altogether not-so-disappointed sigh.

It's a path. Hastily constructed, extremely flammable and dangerously rickety, but workable. Before you even realise you're speeding up, you've sprinted halfway across it and pelted the only piglin on it with a handful of gold nuggets. Everything around you is roaring and snuffling and bubbling and crumbling, so very loud, and most people hate it. Not you. It's gonna be okay. The guilt can wait, because now is _adrenaline again_ and now is _a_ _ghast?_ and now is _don't look at the enderman_ and now is _bright light fire light_ and now is _i will not die_ and now is running on the path he has made. You plummet rather than jump into Tommy's shoddy portal, laughing like a little madman, and you skid out into the abruptly silent dark.

Right. Night-time. Well, that's okay; the path continues, hard-packed dirt and little else. Based on what little you know of the outer lands' geography, you can just follow it through the copse to wherever Tommy's been eking out a living. You're going to hug him for hours, you think, and apologise for longer. You hate him so much for what he's done. You love him so much for who he is. These base truths could not be reconciled in the face of Dream's blackmail, but maybe they can now.

Although, you've been walking an awful long time and it's still pitch black save the silhouette of the soil. Where are his torches? For Prime's sake, Tommy, that's just the kind of thing he'd forget. A tingle of irritation corners you and you let it. Ignoring the problems he caused is what got your friendship in this mess in the first place. You'll just reach the end of his path and calmly, firmly, tell him how to fix it. And then he'll pretend to know how to fix everything else. And you'll muddle along better than ever before.

The path does of course end eventually. To your trepidation it ends in rubble and mulchy torn-up turf and the still-smoking remains of clustered firepits. That means explosions. Memories of grinning black skulls and red-white-blue agony lance through your ribcage, and suddenly the world becomes a thick and gloopy treacle. Movement is a struggle and the new moon makes it hard to find purchase on the ruined ground. Death has touched Logsted. Somehow you don't think it's a little death.

No, no. No. Shit. TNT was banned at home for a reason, shit. It's all you can do to follow the remainder of the path as it loops back into the forest, hoping beyond hope that it's all just a treasure hunt. That it will lead you to his new base, safe and sound, and Dream did not do this, did not leave his calling card in gunpowder and sand. You burst out of the treeline with branches tearing at your useless uniform and you gape upwards.

It's a pillar.

It's a pillar.

It's a pillar, and nothing else.

Surely not. He wouldn't. He...

You would sell your soul and then some not be alone in this moment. Even if it was Schlatt by your side, taunting you into the kind of scar that a little death could not erase. Even if it was Dream, giggling quietly, because he finds your little lives so awfully amusing. Even if it was _George Sapnap Callahan Sam Alyssa Ponk Bad Punz Fundy Grayson Wilbur Skeppy Eret Jack Niki Alex Karl Hbomb Techno Ant Phil Connor Puffy Vikk Lazar Ranboo_ , not one of them are who you need to see standing in front of you right now. Searching around the base of the tower is almost as horrific a thought as leaving it undisturbed. Indecision wracks your frame to the point of genuine pain.

Frozen in place, staring, you can practically taste it. "You should have seen the look on your face!" he will say, and you will punch him, and he will deserve it, but he will be okay. But what he's made here isn't just another useless pillar. Tommy has made what he always makes.

It's a road. And as you stand there, queasiness rising from your toes in your boots to the joints of your knees to the stony weight forming just under your Adam's apple, you realise where it ends.

The curious groan of a zombie breaks you out of your reverie. It has its hands twisted uselessly in your hair, working itself up to a snarl, slobbering against your chestplate. Fucking creatures. For a tick or two you wonder who it was. You think about what they built, if anything. Then you run it through without wondering anymore, and end the sick magic with a well-placed twist, and watch it collapse into a clump of meat and ash. And then, with one last lingering look, you turn your back on the end of everything. The movement is easier than one might think. Unlike some people you could name, there are no voices screaming at you to stop.

Out of the trees. Back to the puddles of light around the last few remaining gouts of flame. Tommy. What the fuck. What the fuck are you going to do. What even can you do, when he of everyone is gone? You did this, you did this, you sent him away knowing he couldn't take it, but you were _so_ angry and it was all _so_ unfair-

Stumbling through the doughy wet sand, you finally stop ignoring your communicator and scroll unseeingly through the mourning you find there. Your new right hand man has died. A real, second death. To your own brother. They're saying he hacked out his fucking teeth, made it hurt for the sake of hurting. That, more than the killing itself, is what unsettles you. When will it all end? If Dream changed or removed the cap on the number of real lives, would it even begin to stem the flow of bloodshed and pain? Maybe not. Maybe it would only prolong the fighting. Prime above, maybe you're tired of the weight that is continuing to care.

After you've finished retched up nothing into the dunes, a hand dragged across your face that you immediately regret when the tacky sanguine smears over your eyelids, you finally reach the coastline and the sorry beachside tent Phil told you about. It doesn't look like it's been made for more than an evening. In fact, it looks almost as if he was throwing a party. A party of one. You are so very stupid. And, for once, alone.

No matter. Logstedshire is a ruined wreck and your armour is sitting in the snow somewhere up north, so you're fresh out of options. Normally you would just throw yourself on a creeper to get home fast. Tonight, you are wary of the little deaths. You think like this, disjointed, simple and detached, because otherwise you will shatter like so much iced glass. As you duck inside the soot of a single dying torch claws at your eyes.

Something rattles nearby and you tumble backwards onto Tommy's spare bed. It is unmade, which is funny, and wintry cold, which is not. Fuck. Fuck this all to hell. You aren't a man. You aren't the President L'Manberg needs. You're a scared and bloody child, and your dad is sick of you, and your biological parents don't give a shit, and two of your brothers have died because you could not save them in time from themselves, the only thing that could ever take them down. The third you have poked and prodded like a chained bear into what sounds like utterly enthusiastic murder. Wilbur was supposed to be the leader, or Tommy, or even Techno if he could have ever accepted it. So. This is all your fault, it's all your primedamn fault, and it is little more than Phil's survival drills that keep you under the ragged canvas. You fasten the tent flaps together with disobedient, jellied fingers and you sob until you pass out.

**Author's Note:**

> according to ao3 statistics, i'd really appreciate it if you checked the kudos button and left a comment with any feedback! this is angstier than usual and spans roughly two minutes of on-stream time so apologies for the pacing.


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